College football bowl projections: Alabama rejoins playoff field, while Texas, SMU move up

Sometimes the penultimate weekend of the college football season can make the playoff picture clearer. There are just a handful of championship games left and a finite amount of results combinations can make things easier to predict.

That's not the case this year, even with the expanded 12-team field in place for the first time. There are at-large candidates with their regular season over and how the committee will sort them is anybody's guess. There's five conferences vying for first-round byes and the championship games will sort out those races. And how the seeding among all these teams are impacted by the games this weekend is unclear.Does a second loss by Penn State and third by Georgia send them behind teams that do not play next week? Or would a good outing against the respective No. 1 (Oregon) and No. 2 (Texas) teams actually improve their seeding stock?

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That's for next week. So what changed this week in the projected CFP field? Texas replaces Georgia as the SEC champion. SMU is now the ACC representative after Miami's loss knocked the Hurricanes out of the field. Off its defeat of Southern California, Notre Dame improves its seeding and will now host a first-round game. And the SEC gets its fourth team in field with three-loss Alabama edging South Carolina on the basis of the head-to-head result between the schools.

As for the entire postseason picture, there are 82 teams that finished bowl-eligible, which means all the bowl games will be filled with teams with six wins. Funny how that all works out.

Notes: Not all conferences will fulfill their bowl allotment. An asterisk represents a replacement pick. Legacy Pac-12 schools in other conferences will fulfill existing Pac-12 bowl agreements through the 2025 season.

College football bowl projections

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: College football bowl projections: Alabama in playoff, Texas, SMU rise